Page 14 of After Life
“If you die, I swear to god I will summon you and annoy you for the rest of eternity,” he snarled, turning to run back to our room for the phone. I strode to the kitchen and nearly slipped on a wet patch that hadn’t been there earlier—a slick spot like oil or grease, between the sink and the small table where we’d eaten earlier. Fumbling for the light switch, I hissed as the overheads glared to life. The patch was clear, glossy, and thick, more like some sort of mucilage or slime than the spilled grease I assumed it to be. It wasn’t a lot, just enough to be an issue if you weren’t expecting it. It made the soles of my slippers feel slick and my cane slide as I tried to ease past it, to the kitchen door bouncing gently in the stiff offshore breeze that cut through the back garden.
Gingerly, I pushed the door wide and stepped onto the small back porch. The garden was dark, the sodium glow of the security light doing little to illuminate the space beyond a small glowing sphere next to the house. Should’ve grabbed my phone. I can’t see for shit out here. The moonlight was enough to pick out the flagstone path that led from the porch and into the garden, so I moved forward quietly, listening for whomever had been in the house. Only the rush and sigh of the ocean—not nearly as far away as I’d thought from the sound of things—and the rustle of the constant breeze could be heard. If someone was out there, they could be tapdancing on the flagstones ahead of me and I’d never hear them. Not until I got too close. Still, because I’m a dumbass with a PhD, I followed the path into the garden. The high walls around the property meant that, if someone had taken off out of the back door, they either had to have a ladder waiting to scale the wall, or they’d be stuck back there until they could go back through the house and get out the front door.
Or they just happen to be staying at the cottage on the back of the property and don’t have to try to escape at all. I thought hard about what I’d seen—could it have been Sandra? The figure had been tall—taller than me, or nearly so. And big. But that didn’t mean anything really—size could be misinterpreted due to lighting, disorientation, or even the use of disguise.
But why would she disguise herself to come stare at us sleep?
Is this some weird fetish thing? Or something that’s going to get us our own Dateline special and a memorial bench on the beach one day?
“Hey!” Oscar’s panting voice carried softly from the porch, startling me from my increasingly gruesome thoughts. “Sandra didn’t answer, and there’s definitely no emergency number here.” He jogged up beside me, bare toes curling on the cool flagstone, and shivered. “Christ, why is it so cold?”
I glanced at him and smirked. “Because you’re mostly naked. Not that I mind.” He made a face at me, rubbing hands up and down his arms. Asking him to go back inside to get warm would go over as well as a lead balloon, so I gestured to the stone path. “I was going to see if I could find whoever it was, or where they got in.”
Oscar nodded, untucking his arms to show me his phone, turning the little flashlight on. “Together, or divide and conquer?”
I hesitated, and he rolled his eyes, smiling a little. “I’ll go around the house, you go to Sandra’s? Shout if something happens?”
I nodded. “Meet back in ten?”
“Fifteen,” he offered. “And if I don’t see you on the porch by then, I’ll”—he shook his head— “do something suitably dramatic.”
I gave him a quick kiss on the side of his mouth. “Be careful, okay?”
“I’m not the one who nearly got murdered less than a month ago,” he pointed out, worry tinging his tone. Before I could protest or assure him I’d be fine, he held the phone out to me. “There’s enough light around the house for me to see where I’m going. You take this.”
We split up, Oscar jogging back to the porch before following it out of sight along the back of the house, and me turning to follow the flagstone path. The breeze stirred the overgrown plants, each rustle of leaves and stems making me tense up, sure it was whoever had been standing over us. The path wound through thick green stands of cabbage palmetto and smooth hydrangea before jinking down a small drop. The weak light of the phone barely pierced the darkness, the glossy leaves of clematis plants and something thorny and viny swallowing any shine the weak LED could provide. The path narrowed, the flagstones replaced by rough-hewn rock that looked worn by time and unsteady to walk on. I picked my way along the path carefully, wincing when one of the thorny plants caught my bare forearm, leaving itching pinpricks as I pulled free. I hissed in annoyance, jerking back when another of the vines scraped my ankle and calf through my sleep pants. The sudden movement sent me slipping on the stones, flailing out with my cane as if it could stop my fall.
“The hell you doing?” Sandra hissed in the dark, her surprisingly strong hands closing around my upper arms and jerking me upright before I could go sliding down the stones to whatever lay beyond the attack berries. “It’s the middle of the goddamn night!”
She glared at me in the phone’s light, still fully dressed despite the late hour. Around knee level, I heard the soft huff of an annoyed dog. “Lenny, heel,” she muttered. “I asked you a question,” she said, whipping her attention back on me. “You trying to cause problems, Doctor Weems? Sneak in some filming for your show? The people here deserve respect, do you hear me? If you’re going to disturb their rest—”
“Whoa, whoa! Hold on! We tried to call you but Oscar said you didn’t answer. Someone was in the house earlier—I woke up to them staring at me while we slept. Oscar’s looking around the outside of the house to see if he can find where they got in. I’m looking out here in the garden to see if I can find where they got out.”
Sandra’s expression shuttered. “There’s no way anyone got in,” she said, tight-lipped. “Lenny would’ve lost his shit if someone was skulking around in the dark.”
I glanced down to see the bored-looking Airedale inspecting one of the steppingstones. “I’m sure he would’ve, but the fact remains we saw someone.”
She grunted softly. “Maybe you did. But I’ve been walking Lenny for the past half hour and there’s been no one in the gardens but me. Me an’ the Tibbins family.” She jerked her chin at a dark spot between a stand of palmetto and what resolved itself to be a small gazebo as my eyes adjusted to the dark. “Celeste and Thomas have been here since the late seventeenth century. The rest came later.”
I turned the phone in the direction she indicated. A cluster of small, round-topped headstones like so many jagged teeth stood just feet away, hidden by the night and the weather-worn color of the stones. “There’s a graveyard,” I murmured. “The original owners, I’m assuming?”
She nodded. “Thomas insisted on being buried here instead of on the mainland, and Celeste couldn’t stand to be away from him. The others are their kids, grandkids, and so on. Except for Jeremiah. He’s...” She glanced up at me, her expression—which had been soft a moment before, tensed back up and she shook her head. “Well, Jeremiah’s not here. His nephew, Tobias, became the heir to the family fortune and is buried here, with his wife and children.”
“How many graves are there?”
She shrugged. “Fifty, that I know of. This is just the old graveyard. The new graveyard is past the cottage, overlooking the inlet where the ships used to come.” She fumbled something out of her sweater pocket and a moment later, bright blue LED light flooded the space around us. The graveyard was small, old, and honestly, the most amazing thing I’d seen in days (okay, so not counting the ghosts—I was still having very definite feelings to work through about ghosts). “Most of them are in the new one. This one here was made when it was still just them and the Noonans on the island.”
“The Noonans?”
She nodded. “They owned the land that’d become Tibbins Quay. Funny how that worked out.” Swinging the light up to illuminate the path behind me, she jerked her chin in greeting. “Mr. Fellowes.”
Oscar gave a small wave and crossed his arms over his bare chest, tiptoe-jogging toward us in his fuzzy slippers. “Good evening, Ms. Cochrane. Lovely night for it.”
She quirked a brow. “Seems so, for both of you to be out and half-dressed.”
Oscar chuckled, coming to stand next to me. “Julian told you about our little incident, I take it?”
Sandra nodded. “I’ve been outside for a while now, walking Lenny, and haven’t seen a thing.”
